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Dr Andrew Shepherd is the Co-Director of A Rocha Aotearoa New Zealand. He has twenty-five years’ experience teaching and facilitating learning in the areas of theology, ethics and environmental studies. He works in theological/environmental education with churches and community organizations and also has teaching and research roles with a number of tertiary education institutions. Andrew lives with his family in the Makarora valley, on the doorstep of Mt Aspiring National Park and Te Wāhipounamu – a UNESCO World Heritage site.

We live in a moment of history in which our way of living is characterized by shrill advertising, rampant over-consumption and wanton waste – all with disastrous consequences for the ecological communities we are part of and upon which we depend on for our very survival. And yet, there is an alternative narrative.

Recently I was staying overnight in a rural cottage and decided to get up for an early walk. It was bitterly cold. The fields were nearly bare; however, the hedgerows and field margins were bursting with life. The richness of life at the margins got me thinking.

Last summer, events conspired to give me three totally different experiences: Week 1 at a Christian festival, part of Week 2 with my family at Disneyland Paris, and Week 3 at the Taizé Community in France. The question I found myself asking was, ‘What is the spirituality of this gathering? What are its “gods” – its underlying, unwritten values and assumptions about what really matters?’

I long for a transformed, honest food system in which there will be an end to economics characterized by ‘skimping the measure, boosting the price and cheating with dishonest scales’… Yet the supermarket mantra of ‘get big or get out’ certainly seems to be winning the war right now, and our mission here appears to be ‘impossible’. But is it?